


Memories I Never Lived

by millenniumrobin



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 22:38:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15543687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millenniumrobin/pseuds/millenniumrobin
Summary: My name is Barbara Gordon. And if you’re reading this… well, I actually don’t know what it means if you’re reading this. The rules of time travel are still not exactly clear to me. But the most obvious answer I can come with is that if you’re reading this, it means I failed. It means I didn’t stop Dick Grayson from royally fucking up the timeline.Written for the Batfam Week 2018 challenge: Time Travel





	Memories I Never Lived

My name is Barbara Gordon. And if you’re reading this… well, I actually don’t know what it means if you’re reading this. The rules of time travel are still not exactly clear to me. But the most obvious answer I can come with is that if you’re reading this, it means I failed. It means I didn’t stop Dick Grayson from royally fucking up the timeline.

I should probably start from the beginning. I’m sorry if this is confusing, it still is to me, too. For the past twenty-seven years I’ve lived a relatively normal life as Barbara Gordon, daughter of Gotham Police Captain Jim Gordon. That was until last year, when my father was murdered by the mob. For two decades my dad tried to clean up this city, tried to clean up the police department, and it got him killed. But in my grief I started seeing visions. Flashes and fragments of another world I didn’t know. But I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before. Which is odd, because I remember everything.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had something called “Eidetic” – or photographic – memory. Anything I’ve seen, heard, touched, or experienced, I remember. It was a blessing when it came to studying – a curse when it came to relationships. But if you asked me what I was doing on April 17th when I was 13 years old, I can tell you exactly that. I took a test in school. Aced it. Had gymnastics practice. Fell off the balance beam three times. My father tried his very best to make spaghetti for dinner.

But almost immediately after my father’s death I started having flashes of new memories, ones that I didn’t know. I saw a boy, one with wavy ebony hair, bright blue eyes, and an infectious laugh. I saw him swinging from the rooftops in scarlet and green. And I saw him with a man dressed as a bat. I had no idea what this was. At first, I thought they were nightmares, horrible visions of a Gotham City already so far beyond saving. But accompanying those visions were feelings for this boy. Feelings like I’d never felt before; I felt warm and safe around him. But there was no record of a boy in scarlet and green with an “R” on his chest, or a man dressed as a bat anywhere in the history of Gotham City. Or anywhere in the world. Something was wrong.

And so I did what I do best. I threw myself into research. I cannot tell you, dear reader, how many countless hours I spent in the library or combing through web archives. Mythology, history, symbolism, vigilantes. I even contacted some of the world’s biggest superheroes, to see if they knew anything about what I was seeing. I never got a response.

Throughout this research, my visions continued. It was like the pieces of a massive, multilayered jigsaw puzzle were slowly coming together, even though I didn’t know what the end result would be. I saw new things, more vividly than before. I heard voices, aliases. I saw myself also dressed as a costumed vigilante running across the rooftops and felt that boy’s embrace. Even as a vision, he stirred feelings I didn’t know were possible.

And then, one night, I finally heard his name. Uttered from my own lips, if you can believe it. Dick Grayson. Finally, a lead beyond “Batman” and “Robin”. I cannot tell you how fast my fingers flew over the keyboard of my computer that night, searching every archive and tax record across the United States for the man named Dick Grayson. I couldn’t find one.

The last name was familiar, a circus act that had come to Gotham just after my father and I moved here. The Flying Graysons. The only reason I remembered it is because I had seen the news reports. They were performing a trapeze act without a net and the rope broke. The ringleader, Haly, had insisted that someone had cut the rope. So did a young boy. But police didn’t find any evidence of that. But even remembering the deaths of Mary and John Grayson didn’t lead me any closer to finding Dick Grayson.

So I hacked the Gotham Police files. It wasn’t hard; I had helped my father build part of the digital security system when he was still Captain. I found the case file on the Grayson deaths compiled, very sloppily, by Detective Bullock. At the very end of the report was a scrawled note, almost illegible in the copy scanned into the database. _“Son, Richard, transferred to foster care. No living relatives.”_ It clicked for me. All this time I had been searching for “Dick Grayson” when I should have been searching for “Richard”. It didn’t take me long to find him.

Hacking into the foster care databases weren’t any harder than hacking into GCPD’s. I found Richard Grayson’s file quickly, a picture accompanying it. Those same eyes that I had seen in my visions stared back at me. I scanned the screen, eager for information on where to find the boy, now my age, who had haunted my mind. But his file was astonishingly small. A mere two months after being put into a foster home Dick Grayson disappeared, his body found floating in the Gotham River a few days later. The hit was a classic mob style, though no one was ever charged. I thought I had hit a dead end.

In my frustrations came more memories. Visions of rooftops and crime fighting and long nights spent together. And then memories of parties and galas. Those provided my next biggest clue. Because in each of those memories, ever present near Dick Grayson, was Bruce Wayne. Playing the part of the gracious host but with an air of seriousness that I recognized, even though I had only met the man a time or two in real life. That was when it all clicked for me. Bruce Wayne was the Batman. Or had been, in that timeline. Again, time travel is confusing.

So I made an appointment to see Bruce Wayne in his office in Wayne Tower. The meeting… did not go well. He had no idea who I was talking about when I mentioned Dick Grayson, said he had no recollection of any “Batman”, and very kindly asked me to leave his office. I was at another dead end. If no one else was remembering these things or having these visions, how would I figure out what was going on? How could I figure out what was missing from my life, where these memories were coming from?

The answer came from a very unexpected source.

About a week later, there was a knock on my door after midnight. I pulled out the gun my father had given me as an 18th birthday present for protection. Visitors didn’t drop by unannounced at my apartment. Ever. But standing on the other side of the door was Bruce Wayne. And in his hands he held a scrawled drawing of the Batman. The drawing, though amateurish, still contained all the details of the suit that had been haunting my mind. And I had not told him about any of it. Turns out that he had been having visions as well.

We spoke for hours that night. Neither of us slept. It was like one of those nights on patrol that had dominated my memories, but instead of hunting down criminals, we were hunting details from the recesses of our minds. The two of us began to realize how our lives were different from these memories in ways large and small. Oswald Cobblepot was not a criminal mastermind called the Penguin, but instead was the corrupt mayor of Gotham City. Former District Attorney Harvey Dent had been murdered by the mob just a few years before my father, never becoming horribly deformed as Two Face. And there was no mention, in any record, of a criminal called “The Joker”. We did, however, find his paramour, Dr. Harleen Quinzel. She’s the head of the Gotham University Psychology Department, and one of the most respected voices on mental illness in the entire world.

But it wasn’t just criminals. We also started figuring out nuances of our own lives in this alternate timeline, as well as those around us. We began remembering a boy named Jason Todd, who became Robin after Dick became his own hero called Nightwing. We looked him up, and I actually laughed out loud when I discovered he had become a priest, leading a parish in Blüdhaven. It was so unlike the persona we “remembered.”

We also saw a team of heroes protecting the planet, a gathering called the Justice League. This team had Bruce at the helm, partnered with Superman and someone named Wonder Woman. Superman generally operated out of Metropolis; even he didn’t come around Gotham. But Wonder Woman was a mystery. I felt like I knew her, just like I felt I knew everyone in those memories, but there was no record of her anywhere in our world.

That was it for the first night. Both of us were exhausted by the amount of new information that had been barraging us for hours. But we met again the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Each night, the picture of our alternate lives began to come together more rapidly, but we could still not figure out what event had triggered such a drastic change for us, for Gotham, and for the entire planet.

My first clue should have been how much different the Bruce Wayne in my visions was from the Bruce Wayne frantically writing new memories down on a piece of paper with one hand, a slice of greasy pizza held in the other. This Bruce Wayne held almost a carefree attitude not seen in my visions. He smiled. He laughed, though that was usually from the delirium at having been up for so many hours with far too little caffeine. Once again, the key to continuing down the rabbit hole came from his mind, not mine.

I can describe the moment vividly for you, dear reader. He sat bolt upright, color draining from his face in an instant and eyes widening more than I thought possible. His breath caught in his chest and solitary tears snaked their way down each cheek. When his azure eyes locked with mine, a new pain was present that hadn’t been there before.

“My parents…” he choked out, wiping away the tears. “My parents were murdered when I was a boy. That’s why…” Bruce’s hands frantically shuffled through his notes on the table until he found the scrawled drawing he brought the first night. “That’s why I became the Batman.”

And that was the moment the rest of the puzzle was revealed to me. As if he was sitting in my kitchen with me, I heard the words Dick Grayson spoke. “I have to save him, Babs. I have to save him from this lifetime of pain.” I saw an argument I’d never had, remembering the words like I was speaking them right at that moment. My worries about messing with the timeline, the damage it could cause. He kissed me and showed me the plans for a time machine he and Bruce had built.

“You thought it was a joke,” I told the Bruce sitting at my kitchen table. “You never thought it would work. You said there would never be a power source strong enough.” But there was. It came in the form of kryptonite crystals that Batman had hoarded in his Batcave beneath Wanye Manor. And with that, Dick Grayson had disappeared in a flash of light and wind.

That was the end of the visions. Rubbing his hands over his face, Bruce looked dejected. There was no way he could remember how to re-build that time machine, he said. For the first time in weeks, I smiled. This time the spark of inspiration came from my brain. Dick had shown me the plans in my memories. He had given me the way to get to him, me and my eidetic memory.

So we built a time machine. Not in the Batcave like before, but this time in a secret R&D lab at Wayne Tower. And the power source, those kryptonite crystals? It turns out that as much as things change, some still stay the same. Wayne Tech had been hoarding a small stockpile of them to conduct research. Bruce Wayne happily donated them to the cause.

We worked for weeks off my snippets of memory. I constantly worried that I had missed something, but test after test showed that, theoretically, this machine should work. And in that time I saw new visions. Not of a past life, but of the future. A possible future. One where Dick and I were happy, married with children. We had hung up the capes and cowls and found fulfilling lives keeping the world safe not as vigilantes, but as parents. It was those happy memories that have kept me going during these last long weeks.

As we finished inserting the power source and watched the machine hum with energy, I told Bruce that doing this would destroy the happy life he had. His parents were still alive now, still able to see the man their son had become. He smiled again and that nagging feeling that it was all wrong returned in the back of my brain. He said that if this world was the result of time being changed, then it was wrong. It was an aberration, he said, one we had to fix. If we looked around, we could see the ways time was trying to right itself, and Bruce theorized that eventually the cosmos would correct violently to get things back to the way they should be.

He wanted to be the one to head back to stop Dick, but I wouldn’t let him. For one, he shouldn’t be interacting with his younger self. For all we knew that could create a paradox that would fold the entire universe in on itself. But his visions had also never been as strong or as detailed as mine. It was like he was watching things on a screen, while they felt real to me. The emotions that accompanied them was too strong to ignore. And I knew the only chance to stop Dick Grayson would be to use that shared emotion.

I hope no one ever reads this letter, but if you do, spread it far and wide. This is not the way the world should be. And sooner rather than later someone, something, is going to come along and correct it. You have to be prepared.

So, dear reader, that’s why I’m heading into the past. To stop the man I love, but don’t even know. To save him from making a mistake that will destroy everything. If I can’t save him, then I’ll do what I must to restore the timeline. I only hope the damage can be fixed.


End file.
